


Hurt/Trust

by AnnetheCatDetective



Series: Is This Love I'm Feeling [2]
Category: St. Elsewhere
Genre: Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 18:01:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17430809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/pseuds/AnnetheCatDetective
Summary: Taking place alongside GMTN's 'Unnecessary', episode-related for 'Baron von Munchausen'. Jack's feelings throughout, on the loss of a patient and on feeling undervalued by a friend.





	Hurt/Trust

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to closed captioning and a lot of hitting of the pause button, the dialogue is show-faithful where it comes in... That part's not me.

Maybe two and a half hours ago he’d told his patient he’d see him that evening, and now he’s hearing-- and not even from Victor himself-- that they lost him. He’d said he didn’t think surgery was the right step, Victor never even asked him before putting Anthony Rizzo on the board, like Jack didn’t even matter once he was involved, once he thought he knew what was best, and okay, so… so maybe Victor’s smarter than he is and maybe he went to a good school and maybe he’s Dr. Craig’s heir apparent in the OR, but Jack  _ told _ him he wasn’t comfortable with this, and with everything Rizzo had been through, and then he learns his patient died on the table, and Victor Ehrlich, the man who told him there was nothing to worry about, that this was the answer, he’s… he’s what? Hiding out somewhere? He at least owes Jack something, some kind of explanation, he doesn’t know what, but something. 

 

He’s angry, and he’s  _ hurt _ . It hurts that Victor couldn’t respect his concerns, that the minute he calls him in for a consult-- no, that’s not fair, he didn’t take over right away. Jack asked him to look at some x-rays and give an opinion and he’d had his viewpoint, and that was to be expected, but he’d been respectful, he hadn’t talked over Jack when they were with Mr. Rizzo, not the first time, not even when he’d gone in to say he’d scheduled a slot in the OR without Jack’s blessing, he didn’t try to show him up in front of the patient, but it feels better to be angry with him than to be hurt by the way he’d dismissed him. The way he hadn’t trusted him as a doctor, brushed his worries off as just… what? More proof Jack Morrison can’t make a call to save his life-- or someone else’s? That he was only going to stall and wait around forever? That he didn’t have anything else? Well he had something else, he had one more test to run, but by the time it’s done running, Mr. Rizzo will have been dead… will have… If the morgue is having a slow day he could be in and out of getting autopsied before the results get back to Jack, it doesn’t even matter, it doesn’t matter because Victor Ehrlich decided he knew better. No, because he wanted to be back in the OR, he wanted to dig around in somebody’s insides.

 

Jack just doesn’t understand that. They’re all doing the same job, healing people, and sometimes surgery’s a vital part of that greater service to mankind, sure, but… enjoying it? He can’t wrap his head around it. Phil had considered specializing in surgery at first, he knows, and goes to some of Dr. Craig’s lectures still, even though he thinks he’ll probably stick to internal medicine, he’s not put off by it but he doesn’t get off on it, either. Ehrlich gets excited about it, and Jack can’t get that.

 

He finds him, down in pathology, outside the morgue. Still in scrubs, he must have brought the body down personally, which explains why Jack was hearing about this from someone else, but it doesn’t make him any less upset.

 

“What happened?” He demands, and Victor just spreads his hands helplessly, and that doesn’t make him any less upset, either.

 

“I don’t know. He tripled on the table--”

 

“You couldn’t wait to cut into him, could you?” He cuts him off, disgusted. He doesn’t know? He doesn’t even have answers, after all this? All his smarts and he doesn’t know why a man just died in his care instead of staying alive in Jack’s? Everything wrong with him, it was weird, it was mysterious, but it wasn’t killing him. Not like this!

 

“It was routine! Nothing should have gone wrong--” He spreads his arms again, like that’s good enough, an answer like that. It won’t be good enough for the man’s family. Should have! Well they don’t live in a world of should have, they live in a world of did, and what did happen was that something went wrong, and he should at least be able to say what when he’d been the one with his hands in the middle of it!

 

“It was  _ surgery _ , Ehrlich, it was invasive!” He interrupts again, can’t stand excuses with no answers, not when that had been his patient, and now... “Something went wrong, because ever since you did your first solo, you’ve been dying to cut again!”

 

Victor starts to open his mouth, and Jack leans in, holds a finger up to stop him, and Victor stops. Slumps, as Jack turns on his heel to go.

 

It doesn’t even feel good, shouting him down. He’s not sure what would have made it feel better. If Victor had had an answer for him, or if they had shouted at each other until they were red in the face and he could get it all out, but as much as the excuses further agitate him, they don’t offer closure, all he can do is just try and prevent more of it when it’s… it’s not what he needs to hear. And he doesn’t know what is. It’s not like anything is going to bring Anthony Rizzo back to life, so what did he even want Victor to say?

 

Worse, he looks… he looks vulnerable without his glasses on, sad. Why couldn’t he have been wearing his glasses, looking like himself, and then Jack wouldn’t have to feel bad yelling at him, when the man doesn’t deserve his sympathy. If he hadn’t been so arrogant, if he hadn’t been so eager… If anyone deserves Jack’s sympathy, it’s Anthony Rizzo, who wouldn’t have died if Ehrlich didn’t jump the gun and schedule that surgery.

 

He’d seek Peter out hoping for a sympathetic ear, but he’s not at St. Eligius, won’t be back until he completes his recovery, and it’s not the kind of thing he thinks he can go to Phil with, and anyone else he might talk to has better things to do than console him, when they all deal with people dying every day anyway, but… it’s never been like this for him before. It’s one thing if it’s in the ER, or if it’s someone who came in knowing they were dying. Mr. Rizzo was doing so well the last time Jack saw him, mystery ailment aside. He was talking, laughing, lucid and able to move around under his own steam. He shouldn’t have died. He shouldn’t have died, and Jack… he doesn’t know. It was Mr. Rizzo’s choice to go into surgery, Jack could maybe put his foot down with Victor if Mr. Rizzo had been hesitant, but not if he was gung ho about it. And without being able to vent to Peter, he just doesn’t want to see anybody if he can help it. He can’t take every loss like this, but this time… this time it is different, and he just wants to wallow.

 

He goes back down to pathology when Cathy sends for him, is relieved  _ not _ to see Victor there. He’s still upset, and he doesn’t like to be angry, especially at a friend, but he can’t help wanting to hold onto it this time. He thought they  _ were  _ friends, and then Victor went over his head to get his patient approved for surgery, without asking him first! The lack of trust, the lack of respect… that’s no way to treat any colleague, let alone a friend. And it’s not like they’ve talked about… things. Maybe Victor doesn’t have that sense of kinship. A hospital is no kind of place to have the ‘are you one too?’ talk. All they can really do is drop hints, and even those can’t be much. A joke here, a mention of some guy being handsome there. But they’ve done that, and he thought they had an understanding, and he thought maybe that meant something, as part of their friendship.

 

That’s where it stings. He thought they had something that made them different, something that meant they would support each other even if they couldn’t say why, and when push came to shove, Victor didn’t support him. Victor didn’t take him seriously. Not as a doctor and not as a friend, and he’d rather hold onto being angry than think about how much it stings, when he’d been there for Victor. When he would have been there for him over anything.

 

He likes Cathy Martin, really. Or usually he does. She’s weird, but she makes him smile sometimes with it, she comes up with stuff he never would have thought of and she extends him a line of credit, mentally, that he doesn’t think he deserves. Asks him if he knows art and talks to him like he’s more intellectual than he feels, and she talks about her life and how it’s going right for her right now, and that’s nice. In the middle of the day he’s having, it’s nice to be reminded that other people are doing okay, the world is doing okay. 

 

He likes her. And she’s smart, and she’s nice, and her being spacey doesn’t take away from that, and he wouldn’t want to spend all day with her, maybe, but also, maybe… maybe they also have that thing in common, but he wouldn’t really know how to tell with a woman. That’s not why she reminds him of Victor. He can’t put his finger on why she reminds him of Victor, and most days he wouldn’t mind, but today he does. Not enough to rush her too much, to try and get in and out fast, because at least the morgue is quiet, and he just wants to be away from people a little.

 

And then she brings up Mr. Rizzo’s C-terminal insulin, and Jack’s not sure where she’s going yet, or what it means, but it’s something. She brings up the synthroid, and he’s more confused than ever, but…

 

But if he took something, and it interfered with the drugs they gave him, because they didn’t know about it, then… well, then it wasn’t necessarily Victor doing something wrong, and he’s still hurt, but it’s something. He doesn’t know what yet with that, either, but there’s a chance, and if there’s a chance, then he has to figure out what’s going on before he can say anything too definitive. And he’s not so upset that he can’t be glad that it’ll be on the record that it wasn’t what Victor did, that he didn’t mess up, that it was…

 

This. Whatever ‘this’ is.

 

Victor… wherever he is, he thinks he killed a man today. Jack’s not sure he’s ready to talk to him just yet-- even if he didn’t kill Anthony Rizzo, he still hurt Jack’s feelings, but it feels pretty darn petty to go up to him and say that, ‘you hurt my feelings, Victor Ehrlich’, when he must be crushed over this, too. He had been, he never shouted back, he’d been… slumped, so much smaller than he normally looks, and part of that was he was sitting down and part of it was he wasn’t wearing his glasses and that makes a difference somehow, but he’d been…

 

He’s not ready to talk to him. His feelings  _ were _ hurt, by not having that basic show of respect. But there’s time to make that right. First, he needs to talk to… someone. Dr. Westphall, if he’s not too busy, or someone who can shine a light on this damn thing. He can’t think of why Mr. Rizzo would be dosing himself with synthroid, or cow insulin, why he wouldn’t tell his doctor about it when they were running tests on his thyroid and his pancreas and he had to know if he was trying to self-treat, it would be important diagnostic information. Hell, he should have known not to self-treat while under a doctor’s care! So what was he  _ doing _ ? And how could it be worth his life?

 

He’s still left with questions, it feels like more than he came in with, when he does talk to Dr. Westphall and Dr. Craig-- feels a little bad bringing Victor up when Dr. Craig asks, but it’s not like it’s a secret and it’s not like he was ratting him out, he was only saying it was their patient, and that there was something weird that led to the man’s death that wasn’t to do with the surgical team at all, it’s just knowing Victor’s so scared of Dr. Craig, and admires him, and wants to avoid getting yelled at, and he’s angry enough to yell at him himself, or he had been, but he’s not angry enough to sic Dr. Craig on him.

 

He doesn’t understand Anthony Rizzo at all, when he leaves Dr. Westphall’s office, but he understands one thing, anyway. He understands Victor can’t be held responsible. If he hadn’t operated, Mr. Rizzo would have gone to another hospital, had another doctor send him to another surgeon, and maybe the same thing would have happened, or maybe it would have happened the next time, or the next, but… but it’s just the result of a dangerous game, and Victor…

 

He still wishes Victor had asked him first, but he can’t let him go on thinking he caused a man’s death… All the doctors Rizzo'd gone to already, the more he looks through his history the more he's sure, Victor was just the surgeon to draw the short straw.  


 

After a little asking around, he tracks down Victor to on call-- Nurse Papandrao seems a little too eager to tell him where he can find him, considering she asks him in the same breath if he’s going to read him the riot act again. He feels like a heel when he finally knocks on the door, soft, in case Victor’s asleep. The lights are all off, anyway.

 

“Can I come in?” He asks-- also soft, in case, but Victor’s awake, he’s wearing his tie and his coat, and Jack can see the light reflecting off of his glasses when he turns to him and props himself up on an elbow.

 

“Yeah, sure.” He answers, sounds absolutely beat, his voice a little too thick, and Jack doesn’t want to be angry anymore.

 

He turns on the light, lets the door close behind him as he approaches the beds, Victor up on the top bunk. He doesn’t fit any better than Jack does, he feels a little pang of sympathy at how scrunched he looks. How much smaller than he ought to, and how much is trying to fit on the bunk comfortably, and how much is that he’s hurting over this too?

 

They’re about at even height, with Victor propped up like he is on the top bunk, and him standing. Makes it easier to have the conversation they need to have, he guesses. He’s glad Victor seems to prefer the top bunk, the last thing he needs now is for it to feel like he’s lecturing him again before he can even get started, just because of height.

 

“I owe you an apology. The autopsy on Anthony Rizzo showed that he’d ingested a large quantity of synthroid.” Jack says, folding his arms, a little… not quite defensive, but something. Something that isn’t entirely not defensive, either, though Victor just stares at him with the same look he must have given Dr.s Westphall and Craig. “When it reacted with the surgical anaesthetic, it killed him.”

 

“What are you saying?” Victor shakes his head. There’s something so open, too open, in the way he looks at him. Like he can’t quite believe it, like he needs to, like… like Jack is capable of offering some kind of absolution, and it’s too much.

 

He looks away, takes a step back, a step and a half. He has to force himself to relax, he didn’t come here to put more walls between them, not now, but… is Victor always like this, always so painfully earnest? 

 

“I talked to Westphall and Craig. They suggested I dig deeper into his records. So I called some other hospitals.” He says, and that look searching him out… it’s too much. But he can offer something, he is telling him this isn’t his fault. “Over the past seven years, Anthony Rizzo has been admitted to no fewer than fifteen hospitals.”

 

There’s still a weariness settled over Victor, as he pushes himself to sit up, and he doesn’t know any more than Jack does about Munchausen’s, apparently, or at least if he does, his brain’s not there now, he gestures for Jack to slow down.

 

“What-- what for?” He asks, blinking away at the mental fog. Though when his eyes fix back on Jack again, there’s that same intensity, that open need for things to be okay, and maybe that’s not so different from how Jack feels.

 

“Everything.” He says, and there’s no real joy in the laugh he can’t quite help, except… except things are okay. Not with Mr. Rizzo, but with the two of them, maybe. With Victor’s abilities as a surgeon, anyway, and as long as it doesn’t happen again, as long as he always talks to Jack first about operating on one of his patients, at least outside of an emergency, then the two of them. 

 

“I don’t get it. Uh, what’s going on?” Victor shakes his head again, and Jack comes back over to the beds, to where Victor is poised like… like he doesn’t know what. Sitting there hunched over, long legs dangling off the top bunk, and that searching look still haunting him. Half afraid, almost. Even knowing he didn’t kill the man, half afraid of something.

 

“Well, I’m not sure, but… I think he was suffering from Munchausen’s Syndrome.” Jack rests his arms on the bunk. With Victor sitting up, Jack has to look up at him, but it’s a comfortable distance. Victor’s hunched in on himself enough that it’s not far… it feels comfortable. Natural, even, which is a little weird given that Jack hasn’t had to look up at anyone from a standing position since he was seventeen or so, but…

 

“Munchausen. Shot down by the Baron von Munchausen.” Victor says, his brain clearly operating on some other level, drawing lines between things and spitting out what sounds simultaneously like nonsense and… not, somehow. He’s reeling from it, and Jack can understand that. Victor can make as much or as little sense as he likes.

 

“So you see, it wasn’t your fault.” Jack presses. 

 

Victor sighs heavily, turns back to him, and there’s still… too much. Too much on his face, in his eyes, too much in being looked at like this, but somehow Jack doesn’t mind that.

 

“I appreciate this.” He says, before it’s evidently too much for him as well and he has to turn away for just a moment. “I’ve been lying here thinking… You’re right, you know. About this compelling need I’ve developed to get back into the OR. You’re always told that in order to be a good surgeon, you’ve gotta be aggressive. Opinionated. Eager to cut, but it’s no good.”

 

He shakes his head, and he has that look in his eyes again when they meet Jack’s, this fathomless sorry, sad, older-than-his-years look, and Jack doesn’t think Victor Ehrlich was cut out to be an aggressive man. A good surgeon, yes. He does believe that, even after this. But aggression… it doesn’t sit any more comfortably on Victor’s shoulders than on his own. He always seems unhappy when he’s acting that part, always seems lost. And Jack wishes he could tell him… something. That he doesn’t need to be that guy, that he’s good like he is, but who is he to offer that? Just another resident, and an internist at that, it’s not like he has the authority to tell Victor who he should be, he just thinks he should be himself, the version of him that seems right. That studious, whip-smart, kind-hearted and earnest self that he seems most comfortable as, but… But everyone’s got facets, don’t they? He can’t presume to know who Victor most authentically is and is not.

 

“I’ve got to try and curb that kind of thinking.” Victor continues, his voice soft and serious. Sounding like a slightly sadder version of what Jack would call his authentic self, at least. 

 

Jack just nods, just offers a smile and an open hand-- his hand immediately enveloped between both of Victor’s.

 

It is his circulation, then. They’re cool, but they’re strong and they’re gentle and they’re good hands for a surgeon to have, and under the circumstances, Jack doesn’t mind if Victor grabs hold of him a little too much. Not when he’s still got such a look on his face, like he just needs this. Some understanding, some connection. Absolution, however much of it Jack can offer. 

 

“I’ll see you around.” He says softly, starting to move away without quite taking his hand back.

 

“Thanks.” Victor says, and it’s a very all-encompassing ‘thanks’, as he pats Jack’s hand and then lets it slip away, and Jack waves as he slips back out of on call, and the ‘thanks’ stays with him. An echo of it rattles around his skull as he gets back to work.

 

Maybe it’s not that it’s a sadder version of Victor’s authentic self. Maybe it’s that Victor is… sad. That those raw spots come from the same place as this need for something, that it’s…

 

That it’s this thing, that it’s not having people get him, that it’s… a million things, Jack doesn’t know, and it’s exhausting to think about it  _ now _ , but he can’t not. Is Victor-- goofy Victor with his hawaiian shirts-- a sad person? Inherently? Has he made him less sad, is that even something he can do? God knows he tries with Peter, who has real concrete problems that Jack can’t do much about even when he can do anything. He still… It’s still important, he still does his best, he still feels sometimes like he can’t win. He likes the thought that he could do something for somebody, even if he’s useless at a lot, even if there’s too much he can’t fix for too many people, people he cares about… 

 

They’re okay, now.


End file.
